Sie sind auf Seite 1von 17

T

Witchcraft and Deep Time - a debate at


Harvard
Stephen Mitchell^ Neil Price^, Ronald Hutton^,
Diane Purkiss^, Kimberley Patton^, Catharina Raudvere*",
Carlo Severi'', Miranda Aldhouse-Green^, Sarah Semple^,
Aleks Pluskowski^^, Martin Carver'' & Carlo Ginzburg'^
Archaeology, consistently warned off religion by wise old heads, here rushes deeper into the thicket
to tackle the thorny topic of ancient witchcrafi. The occasion was a seminar at Harvard organised
by Stephen Mitchell and Neil Price to mark the twentieth anniversary of Carlo Ginzburg's
infiuential book on the connections between witches and shamanism - and by implication the
possible connections with prehistoric ritual and belief. Archaeology was by no means the only
voice at the meeting, which was attended by scholars active in history, literature, divinity and
anthropology. The discussions revealed much that was entangled in the modern psyche: 'don't let's
tame strangeness' was one leitmotiv of this stimulating colloquium. A romantic attachment to the
irrational is a feature of our time, especially among academics. But maybe taming strangeness is
an archaeologist's real job...

Introduction
Stephen Mitchell
Nocturnal histories: witchcrafi and the shamanic legacy of pre-Christian Europe took the
form of a series of brief introductory presentations followed by lengthy open discussions at
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, over four days in August
2009. The academicfieldsrepresented were intentionally diverse, and included archaeology,
religion, anthropology, literature, history and folklore. Our discussions of witchcraft and
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Folklore & Mythology, Warren House, Harvard University, 12 (Juincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, School of Geosciences, St Mary's, Elphinstone Road,
Aberdeen AB243UF, UK
University of Bristol, School of Humanities, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 ITS, UK
Keble College, Oxford 0X1 3PG, UK
Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Snorresgade 17-19, DK-2300
Copenhagen S, Denmark
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, 52, Rue du Cardinal
Lemoine, 75005 Paris, France
Cardiff School of History and Archaeology, Humanities Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff CFIO 3EU, UK
Durham University, Department of Archaeology, South Road, Durham DHl 3LE, UK
Department of Archaeology, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Box 226, Reading RG6 6AB, UK
Department of Archaeology, University of York, King's Manor, York YOl 7EP UK
Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 56126 Pisa, Italy

ANTIQUITY 84 (2010): 864-879

http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/084/ant0840864.htm

864

Stepben Mitchell et al.

shamanism, set against the backdrop of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Carlo
Ginzburg's 1989 Storia notturna (translated as Ecstasies: deciphering the witches' Sabbath),
made clear that although there are important areas of convergence and mutual learning,
our knowledge of each other's disciplines and methodologies were not entirely equal. The
familiar divisions between those whose methods are largely empirical and those whose work
tends to be principally analytic and interpretive did, of course, begin to emerge, but one
point that struck me was the degree to which the archaeologists were not merely familiar with
textual sources, but had also often trained in philology and other relevant disciplines. Nonarchaeologists, although willing to use archaeological findings, were reluctant, it seemed, to
tread as readily across this disciplinary boundary. Overcoming the still palpable intellectual
atomism brought about by the prejudices (and abuses) of earlier generations no doubt has
a long way to go, but there was a willingness, eagerness even, among our group to push
harder at lowering those walls, while at the same time, respecting the very real differences
that exist between separate academic disciplines.
Our conversations encompassed everything from the lessons of regional episodes to grand
synthesising schemes. With such a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds and specialisations,
it would presumably be unrealistic to hope that there should have been many moments of
consensus, yet I sensed that two such areas did precipitate out of our discussions, one
touching on methodology, the other on a possible venue for future synergy. In the first
instance, the subtext of the most interesting moments for me was that, whether our primary
'texts' consist of charms or potsherds, understanding our mission as one of recontextualising
'lived lives' should be paramount. Our principal goal, whatever our academic allegiance,
should be to understand cultural monuments within reconstructable performance contexts.
The second point that emerged was that from among the many periods and places
represented by the specialists at the meeting, the situation in medieval Scandinavia, due
to the unusual nature and richness of its textual and other sources of information, its
geographical location and its connections to adjacent cultures, represents a unique case, a
tradition-rich area that may hold unparalleled promise for future interdisciplinary efforts.

Interdisciplinarity and emotion


Neil Price
Two aspects of the seminar have stayed with me - firstly the fruitflilness of its format,
and secondly (more obviously perhaps) the synergies generated in discussion. Before the
start, both Steve and I were aware that the entire seminar was a risk and we had mild
concerns as to how exactly the coming days would play out. What if no-one said anything?
What if we were all reduced to silence after the first day, or what if the talks instead turned
unconstructive? The discussions in the event moved rapidly through a phase of establishing
disciplinary fault lines, and then transcending them to seek common ground with a general
sense of surprise at how gentle the process seemed to be. Importantly, I think, the exchanges
also embraced a lot of humour.
For me as co-organiser, with an obvious eye on a functioning debate, the most rewarding
moments were those that I had not expected. Some random phrases from my notes: the
power of names; the importance of maintained anomaly; the problem of ventriloquism; what
865

<a

Witchcrafi and Deep Time - a debate at Harvard

happens when rituals are unfinished; triggers to spiritual fluorescence; trauma as memory
and the curation of stress; the reactivation of latent knowledge; ritual as the constitution of
ideas; that vernacular traditions can remember rightly even when they distort; the force of
the suppressed, and released, voice; the dead as active subjects in all cultures but our own;
industries dedicated to the dead; in ancient perception, spirituality should not be limited to
humans. Above all, to what extent should we try to tame the strangeness of this data, risking
flattening its complexities under the normalising freight of academic discourse? We also
need to be aware of how spirituality evolves, and that what we're looking at may be moving.
I think that alongside new collaborations and budding research projects, for every delegate
the discussions also generated ideas for potential PhD dissertations, and it may well be that
the positive effects will also be felt long afterward by others who were not present at the time.
As a veteran of many conferences in the standard format, I believe one is usually doing well
to come away with even one genuinely new idea or inspiration for research. It is a tribute to
the Radcliffe experience that this time my notes - more than 30 pages - were full of them.
In the most positive sense, it was unlike anything I have done before.
Having spent several days discussing witchcraft at a cool academic remove, it proved
salutary to end by encountering its realities more directly (Figure 1). Under expert local
guidance a visit to the Rebecca Nurse homestead in Danvers (formerly Salem Village, the
site of the infamous witch hysteria of 1692) allowed us to stand in the parlour where
frightened people were threatened not so long ago with horrible pain and death, persecuted
for nothing more than perceived deviance in ideas or behaviour. The quotation used as a
publicity tag-line by the curators of the site cut straight to the quick, as it should: 'Oh God
help me, I am an innocent person'.

Addressing ancient belief


Ronald Hutton
One conclusion above all emerged for me from all the discussions, for which may be
claimed a very wide importance. It concerned the basic message of the book which had
brought us all together: Carlo Ginzburg's Ecstasies. This message was that the witch trials,
a prominent feature of early modern Europe, were underlain by ancient, pre-Ghristian,
traditions of belief concerning the supernatutal. These, according to Garlo, provided much
of the context and character of those trials and determined much of their local form. His
suggestion has been taken up by scholars in Gontinental Europe, together with some in the
United Kingdom and United States who have specialised in particular areas of European
culture, such as Scandinavian studies. On the whole, however, it has been ignored by
British and North American experts on the early modern witch trials themselves. Instead
they have tended to emphasise social, intellectual and functional factors in the creation or
prevention of witch hunts: such as theories concerning the nature and operation of demons
among Western Ghristian theologians; gender and class relations; patterns of kinship and
landholding in particular communities; the weakness or strength of different state systems;
and the condition of the weather and the food supply.
All of these emphases yield good results, but they provide incomplete answers to certain
fundamental questions. Early modern societies, which possessed very similar churches, state
866

Stephen Mitchell et al.

Figure 1. Seat ofjudgement. The reconstructed high seat in the meeting house at Salem Village, site of the witch trials
famously evoked by Arthur Miller in his play The Crucible.

867

Witchcrafl and Deep Time - a debate at Harvard

systems, economies and social structures, and which were equidistant from the
geographical centres of witch trials and often indeed comprehended within the same
kingdom, behaved in very different ways. Some took up witch-hunting with fervour, while
others avoided it. Most instinctively expected workers of destructive magic to be female,
some expected them to be male, and yet others accused both sexes, with a preponderance
of one sex. The attributes and activities attributed to witches also varied very significantly
from place to place. The overall stereotype of a demonic religion was taken up easily in
some but not in others, and the trappings and targets of witchcraft showed a similar variety.
The main hypothesis of Carlo's book is that ancient belief-systems underpinned these
differences.
What this seminar demonstrated collectively is that there is very good evidence for that
hypothesis, and that the Anglo-American scholarly world, at least, needs now to reckon
more with it. In addition, the archaeologists present have shown that material data can be
used to carry out a study of ancient traditions of belief going back far before the beginning
of written records, let alone in more recent periods for which those records are few and
difficult to interpret. These are very important lessons, to which specialists in many aspects
of the European past, from deep prehistory to the boundaries of the modern period, must
now pay better attention.

The nature of the witch


Diane Purkiss
There is now something approaching a historical consensus on the domestic witch and
her role in relation to gender; she is a kind of negative fantasy of all that domestic labour
should exclude. But this explanatory matrix does litde to explain the stories told by what I
designate the 'undomestic' witch, a witch whose concerns and activities involve a spatial and
intellectual exploration of places outside the home and the hearth, the very places in fact,
that the home and the hearth exist to exclude. Embarrassment about Margaret Murray's
entirely incredible efforts (1921) to explain away these cases as signs of an ancient pagan
religion still being actively practised at the time of the witch trials has led to a ringing
silence on these cases and their peculiarities. Only Carlo Cinzburg in his Ecstasies tried to
incorporate these unusual witches into an overall thesis, one that understands the emergence
of a recognisable pagan substrate as a matter of dreaming rather than practice. At the time
of writing, however, more work is being done, including my own.
Cases of undomestic witches are geographically specific; confined to Scotland (both
Highland and Islands - which do in fact have witchcrafb persecutions - and Lowland) and
the border counties of England including Lancashire and the other areas covered by the
Northern assize circuit. There are further geographic differences within this undomestic
region; the Orkneys, for example, have witches whose stories are noticeably indebted to
Norse as well as Celtic myths.
My comments at the meeting concerned three witches whose dittays - confessions - did
appear to bear witness to some unusual beliefs. Or perhaps more accurately, the dittays
collectively bear witness to the naturalisation ofa series of originally perhaps pagan symbols
and figures within a context of medieval Catholicism that then itself becomes taboo with
868

Stepben Mitchell et al.

the coming of the kirk. All three of the witches discussed make reference to figures of
animal masculinity; two (Marioun Grant and Andro Man) to a stag, which in Andro's dittay
arises out of the snow (as if from an underground entrance) and one, in Issobel Gowdie's
confession, to elf bulls who frighten her by bellowing noisily at her and who appear to guard
the entrance to the realm of the fairies. All three dittays also concern fairies themselves, and
in particular the powerful figure of the Queen of Elphame, with whom Andro Man claims
a procreative sexual relationship. The women have less to say about her perhaps because
she is a figure of male fantasy and desire rather than a kind of aspirant woman's avatar.
The Queen of Elphame and her male votaries or victims is also very widely referenced in
the ballad literature collected by Francis James Child; the latter tends to present her as an
intensely sexual but dangerously devouring figure, one who exemplifies the power of wild
nature, in a manner in keeping with the trial records. However, both Marioun and Andro
also refer to a personage they call Christsunday, a more enigmatic figure whose name might
be a Christian screen around the word 'sun', or a genuinely hybrid Christian-pagan figure
interpreted by the courts as diabolical.

'The dead are not dead'


Kimberley Patton
The seminar was an unusual academic experience for me, as I work in the study of
ancient religions but also in the fields of archaeology, ritual studies, comparative religions,
and historical theology. In my colleagues' presentations and in our discussions, I encountered
a consideration of material evidence that is rare, one that self-consciously views such evidence
through the existential and social lenses of the culture that produced it, insofar as that is
possible. The study of the material past, with its legitimate focus on thick description and
scientific analysis, can often be accompanied by a kind of unapologetic reductionism or
utilitarianism in the arena of religious interpretation. Perhaps overcompensating for past
excesses (of the sort that, for example, has seen 'shamanism' in petroglyphs everywhere), this
approach tends to reject the possibility of cultic usage or symbolisation as 'mystification' and
to privilege 'secular' possibilities over 'religious' ones in the name of realistic pragmatism.
The opposite extreme (more symptomatic of past enquiries, and of some modern nonacademic movements) is the exploitation of material evidence in the service of 'mystifying'
theories and ideologies. A more sophisticated view is called for, one that comprehends that,
in the case of ancient peoples, such Enlightenment-vectored dichotomies cannot be read into
the past: religious usages were just as 'utilitarian' from the perspective of the practitioners
as what seem to us more clearly pragmatic or survival-oriented endeavours. Conversely,
quotidian activities could be charged with symbolic meaning. This was the generous tone
of the Nocturnal histories seminar.
It was also a pleasure to hear iconic categories (such as 'witchcraft,' 'written versus
oral traditions,' or 'sacrifice,' for example) triaged in a nuanced way that neither rigidly
defended such ideas nor iconoclastically rejected them. Some interpretive categories do
become obsolete or too ideologically charged and need to be ejected from our ways of
thinking about religious phenomena, even if they sometimes are later rehabilitated. Often,
however, particular new data might seem to undermine a category completely, whereas in fact
869

rt
<u

'T ' ^ " T

Witchcrafi and Deep Time a debate at Harvard

they continue to offer something of value that can be rescued for heuristic or classificatory
purposes despite the necessary reconstruction. This is a process that Jonathan Z. Smith
called 'the rectification of categories,' best undertaken through interdisciplinary discussion
rather than by one scholar. Unlike the sciences, the humanities may discourage collaborative
research or theorising; when archaeology meets the study of religion, two models tend to
clash. Nocturnal histories generated a genuinely collgial approach to its own problems,
particularly as we considered terms and categories. This was the rectification of categories
in action.
My last observation has to do with the seminar's perspective on the dead. A re-surfacing
question in my own work might be, in poetic form, 'Who are the dead and what do they
want?' I asked this question at our seminar in the hght of my own experience in 1992
of the long-delayed Puritan funeral of Ceorge Jacobs, Snr., hanged as a witch 300 years
earher, whose remains could neither be properly honoured with a Christian burial nor,
as it turns out, entirely forgotten by his community of Salem Village in the Colony of
Massachusetts. The subjectivity of the dead is something that is often strangely lost in
scholarship on antiquity; by this I mean that the dead are often construed as moveable
pieces on a board game, 'objects' of our superior gaze, as much artefacts as a bronze axe
or a wheel rut, construed as acting in mono-dimensional, ideologically simplistic ways. We
tend to treat them almost as extensions of their historical landscapes rather than as agents in
tension with their own societies and belief systems, agents whose actions were as complexly
motivated or self-contradictory as our own. Furthermore, these individuals, whether or
not their names are lost, still exert a charismatic imperative through the evidence that we
continue to discover, even as we ourselves prepare to join them one day. 'The dead are not
dead' as the Senegalese poet Birago Ishmael Diop wrote. As scholars, we do not transcend
history or mortality. Without explicitly being stated, this was very much the assumption of
the seminar, and it was a welcome intellectual foundation for our work together.

Religion, empirical inquiry and the transcendent


Catharina Raudvere
My point of departure is that discursive expressions are fundamental for an identification
of something as religious (Raudvere 2002). There must be some sort of reference to
transcendental categories which makes it reasonable to argue that people in the past
attributed meanings to artefacts, images, symbols or spatial construction that go beyond
human experience, but are still possible to grasp with human powers of thought. A reference
to religion hints at a systematic conceptualisation of worldviews, that is a shared and more or
less coherent view on what can be regarded as a part of transcendental, suprahuman, divine
otherworldly realms from an emic perspective.
The concept of religion can never be marked off in a simple mode as it is not an
empirically-given category. Religion is always an abstract concept, an umbrella term within
a given cultural context. It shares a multitude of forms of expression referring to transcendent
entities, be they gods, spirits, the dead, saints or ancestors - but abstract concepts like faith,
energy and health, wellbeing and power can also be covered by the term. Religion is, from
this perspective, a domain in which truths and models about the world can be expressed
870

Stepben Mitchell et al.

within a specific discursive framework with limits under constant challenge and negotiation.
Science and art as well as religion can serve as examples of other such discursive domains.
Religious traditions over time show vast variations in themes and modes of expression, not
necessarily variations compatible with the Christian concept of religion. Local conceptions
and understandings of religion also provide theoretical models of reality, however simple
or sophisticated their proponents. Illiterate social strata have too often been assigned
to collective categories like 'folk religion', 'folk belief, magic and popular culture. Such
tendencies towards homogenisation of despised classes generate two problems: they ignore
differences between vernacular groups and they imply a rough simplification of religion in
everyday life and disconnect it from an understanding of religion as a local theoretical model
of the word in all its respects.
It is the individuals' conceptions and expressions of a transcendental reality (i.e.
independent of human experience, but within the range of human knowledge), which give
rise to the different material we study. This is the basic material for the history of religions,
the very empirical point of departure for our academic activities; but the concept of religion
means that our target is not the expressions themselves but the worlds of conceptions they
hide. The history of religions therefore always has a meta-theoretical character as it departs
from a cluster of academic theories that in their turn deal with (or cover) other emic theories
of reality.

What pictography tells us


Carlo Severi
'Never mistake a drawing for a text,' warned E. Gombrich rightly in his famous book on
The sense of order, the way to produce meaning of an image argued the great historian of art
- is totally different from that of a sign. An image should be freely appreciated aesthetically,
a sign should be deciphered following implicit rules (1979: 362). Faced with pictograms,
elements of iconography that seem to stand midway between sign and image, we feel uneasy.
Can such pictures tell us what people were thinking? Does iconography act as a direct or an
indirect index of cosmology, or neither? The signs we find on pots and stones represent our
principal access to the prehistoric mind. But which aspects of the mind are being accessed?
Let us take the example of the picture-writings of the American Indians, which have
caused some confusion to Western scholars. Historians of art have found them difficult to
understand in purely aesthetic terms; historians of writing found them too pictorial to be
sound vehicles of information. As a result, we often find them exposed in museums hastily
labelled as 'drawings used as supports for memory.' However, what exactly is their relation
to memory? How are they actually used for memorising? What kind of texts do they help
to preserve? What indigenous notions of memory and image are involved in this technique?
Fieldwork (among the Kuna of Panama) and subsequent work on other Amerindian
documents has shown that pictographic iconography does not have an immediate bearing
on the representation of language, but nevertheless follows the particular structure of texts
fixed by tradition. Examination of the pictographic materials and corresponding texts at
our disposal (the Ledger-art of the Plains Indians, Inuit graphic system. Western Apache
pictographs, etc.) leads to two conclusions: what is represented is a variation on a formulaic
871

^
rt
w

Witchcraft and Deep Time - a debate at Harvard

story, carried by the names of people, spirits or places; this guides the chanting of the story to
an audience. Pictorial symbolism, as used in an oral tradition, uses only a limited, specialised
vocabulary. Fundamentally different from phonetic writing, pictography has its basis in its
relationship with oral instruction.
Iconographie and pictographic schemes of this kind assume religious belief, refer to it
obliquely, but do not state it. For this reason, instead of it being seen as a failed form of
writing, it should be regarded as an extraordinarily effective aid to memory, i.e. to what
is already known. The relationship between the pictograms and the words does not lie
where the theorists of writing seek to place it (between signs and phonetic values), but
rather between the sequence of the pictograms and the structure of the text. However like
archaeology, but unlike text, the actual abstract beliefs, of the kind we sought at this seminar,
are never directly conveyed to outsiders, that is ourselves.

Reading prehistoric religion


Miranda-AIdhouse Green
For me, the value of the Harvard seminar lay in the rare provision of an arena for
the exchange of ideas within an interdisciplinary framework. So I was able to present my
evidence for, and interpretation of, material culture within a context of varying forms of
data, theoretical prisms and exegesis, where the templates for study ranged widely between
literature, anthropology and archaeology. I was particularly struck by Carlo Ginzburg's own
comments on emic actors and etic observers, for such distinctions are applicable to the
western European Iron Age as it slid into the sphere of romanitas and the colonialist world
of annexation and absorption into the Roman Empire. Similarly, Carlo's reflections on
'chains of translations', the remark that 'there is no innocent eye' and the need to 'sterilise
instruments of observation' serve as sharp reminders to archaeologists and historians alike
that there is no such thing as an objective take on the past.
It may be that archaeologists actually have no evidence at all, because evidence requires
witnesses. Carver's reference to Sutton Hoo as a 'palimpsest of allusions' (2000: 37) resonates
with the material culture with which I am more familiar, such as the 'Doctor's Grave' at
Stanway (Colchester) that contains just such a palimpsest of symbolism. I also liked Carver's
reference to a kind of 'dark matter' circulating in the background but capable of being
triggered into expression by particular agencies. I could apply such a perception to the
explosion of iconography that seemingly emerged from nowhere in Roman Britain and
Gaul but which must rather have drawn upon both old Iron Age and newly introduced
Classical traditions. Alex Pluskowski's research area of werewolves and shape-shifting in
Scandinavian tradition marches alongside my own observations of shape-shifting imagery
in Gallo-Roman contexts and provides me with insights for interpretation. The contribution
of Neil Price of most relevance to my work was perhaps his comment on the need to use
names carefully and avoid flattening out diversity by over-classification and over-labelling.
The literary specialists in the group provided original avenues for exploration, not least
because narrative is essentially different from archaeology and so the rituals presented in
hterature bring to the table their own problems and opportunities, for instance in issues of
relationships between oral and written traditions and the context and identity of the scribes
872

Stephen Mitchell et al.

recording rituals. Both Gatharina Raudvere and Diane Purkiss stressed the need to recognise
and come to terms with these problems. Garlo Severi and in a sense Kimberley Patton too
presented anthropological perspectives on ritual. Severi's work on native American images
as transmitters of knowledge, and the use of picture-writing to record chants allows me to
revisit with new eyes the ancient European iconography that has long been a major focus of
my research. But perhaps the most powerful evocation of ritual perception was provided by
Patton, whose work on the Salem witch trials was both rigorously researched and movingly
told, reminding us sharply that all of us are concerned with human minds and their capacity
for healing and harming, the latter most graphically represented by the fate of Rebecca
Nurse and George Jacobs. Our visit to Salem Village was a fitting and sobering finale to
four rich days of scholarly debate.

Spirituality, materiality and landscape


Sarah Semple
Grossing boundaries between disciplines and finding ways of integrating differing strands
of research to achieve common understanding of the past is without doubt one of the
most important challenges faced by research. Within archaeology, it has recently included a
shift towards understanding vocality of material culture as an equal means of 'reading' the
actions, thoughts and beliefs of past societies (Moreland 2001: 41). The Harvard seminar
rightly brought this issue to the fore and demonstrated that just as the written record may
fossilise or reinvent actions, beliefs and superstitions, so material culture and the landscape
can be read in similar terms as media employed in the construction of myths and narratives,
reworked and changed according to alterations in belief, political power, religion and identity.
Of the many themes and questions at the seminar that have remained resonant in my
mind, the most persistent has been the suggestion that local and regional responses/changes
in belief or alterations in the strength or conviction of belief may connect to the 'emotion'
of place and belonging. Perhaps most powerfully articulated by Kimbetley Patton in her
review of the happenings at Salem in 1692 and reprised and explored in several papers, an
emphasis was placed on the ways in which communities might set themselves more firmly
in the landscape: naming it, recycling it, weaving it into stories, narratives and superstitions,
developing changing emotional responses to the natural and human altered spaces and vistas
around them. Practices, symbols, rituals were shown to be retrieved, reinvented and created
anew, in the face of external changes or threats, something highly relevant to the changes
effected in landscapes during the Gonversion period in northern Europe (see for example
Semple 1998 and Garver 2001). Ecological, political, economic and social pressures might
produce a change in belief and ritual practice, but also cause communities to look to the
past, recycle ideas and places, i.e. reinvent and resurrect perceived beliefs and traditions
from the past. This on the one hand requires an appreciation of patterns of belief across
the longue dure, but on the other makes it clear that the key to understanding religion
and belief is in discovering the effects of change at smaller scales. Economic, ecological and
social pressures can occur at global, continental and national levels but, it is the local and
regional reception that provides the most colour and noise in the material record and in
the manipulation of the landscape. One is reminded of Robert Redfield's message: to look
873

' ''""

^
tti
u

Witchcraft and Deep Time - a debate at Harvard

for the little traditions, the persistent practices that survive major political, ideological and
social changes (e.g. 1955). It is by interrogating the evidence for local patterns of belief that
we might fruitfully examine the long term continuities from prehistory, but also the changes
in belief and practice over time (e.g. Carver 2009), and seek out the triggers of this spiritual
multiplicity exploring how and why overarching changes and pressures (ecological; social
religious; political) stimulated and affected patterns of belief at local and regional scales.

Inheritance or parahle? The case of werewolves


Aleks Pluskowski
Shape-changing into wolves is a widely documented phenomenon across many regions
of medieval and early modern Europe. Only in Scandinavia is it possible to trace its
development on either side of the conversion to Christianity. Indeed, lupine identities are
evident here from at least the second century AD, not long after the development of the runic
alphabet, and the evidence for the use of animals in social identity and organisation increases
from the fifth century with the proliferation of zoomorphic art. The militaristic culture of
the Vendel period saw the re-organisation of warfare, and the first representations of the use
of ritual animal disguise, which includes a wolf on the famous helmet plate matrix from
Torslunda (Oland) dated to c. AD 600. Such examples reflect more specific incarnations
of the broad associations between carnivores and warriors, although their first description
appears in the tenth century, in the poem HaraldskvtzBi which refers to ulfhednar ('wolf
coats') in battle (Price 2002). Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Icelandic literature contains
the highest number of werewolves of any body of literature from medieval Europe, featured
in 14 sources, with an additional two Norwegian texts known in Iceland (Gumundsdottir
2007:278.). The use of animal disguise gradually moves from the public to the private sphere,
and is rendered from the context of ritual militarism and cult, demonstrably associated with
the god Oinn, into a folk game (Gunnell 1995). The introduction of Continental literary
werewolves into Iceland ultimately supersedes the older tradition, and the shape-changer
is transformed from something innate and pagan, to a magical process, at which point its
popularity in literature begins to decline.
Elsewhere in Europe, there are tantalising fragmentary records of beliefs in werewolves,
but it is only from the fifteenth century that shape-changing into wolves and associated
cannibalistic behaviour began to feature as an occasional component of witchcraft
accusations in France, the Netherlands and parts of Germany (Lorey 2006). Werewolves
were conceptually linked to the witchcraft phenomenon through the motif of cannibalism
and metamorphosis; from the sixteenth century there are testimonies that sometimes they
attacked and consumed people in wolf form, at other times in human form. The cannibalistic
tendency of the werewolf can be pushed back as far as the twelfth century, and so in Christian
culture it represented the monster par excellence. Demonologists and inquisitors, following
the established line of the Church, generally concluded that the process of metamorphosis
was illusionary, unlike popular belief, which they regarded as superstition (e.g. Mackay
2006: 161-2).
However, to what extent is it a manifestation of submerged pre-Christian traditions?
Part of the answer lies in contextualising the werewolf within the chronology of animal
874

Stephen Mitchell tt al.


identities. Christianity appears to have played a pivotal role in re-defining animalistic
identities. Established emblems of power amongst the aristocracy, such as the wolf and bear,
became replaced with the lion and eagle in heraldry developing from the mid twelft:h century
(Pastoureau 2000). Animals came to be used as common metaphors for human society in
literature, public and private art, and arguably the mental worlds of communities from
this time. There is also a break in the evidence for the use of animal disguise between the
conversion period and the fourteenth century, when it increasingly captures the attention
of artists and writers, and may have had an apotropaic function (see papers in Twycross &
Carpenter 2002; Crimaldi 2003). In some Scandinavian regions, this discontinuity in the
evidence is more significant; references to animal disguise do not appear in Norway until the
fourteenth century, but much later in other regions (see regional papers in Cunnell 2007).
The shape-changer can be situated within this Christian cultute where animal identities
were recast, with little evidence to link it to any persistent pagan cult. At the same time,
changing ecology in the later medieval period especially relating to wild ungulates and large
carnivores - almost certainly contributed to the fluorescence of the early modern werewolf
(Pluskowski 2005).
Carlo Cinzburg was of course correct in stating that his seventeenth-century examples
of werewolves do not correspond to theological dismissals of shape-changing as illusory.
However, the influence of centuries of sermonising should be explored in more detail,
as an alternative line of enquiry to the theory of continuity from prehistoric to Christian
societies. The Church's position on the nature of shape-changing could have been hammered
home for generations in very specific temporal and spatial contexts e.g. if local wolf
attacks prompted unease in congregations who, having failed to trap any wolves, may
have dredged up the omnipresent figure of the shape-changer to explain both the killings
and the elusive predator. We certainly know the werewolf in particular was sustained in
'folk memory' (for want of a better term) and escaped into Anglo-Norman Romance and
Old Norse literature. In the case of the latter, an echo of earlier beliefs and practices is
convincing, whereas in the former we do not have enough data for the genesis of either
British or French shape-changing traditions. The use of animal disguise in early AngloSaxon England, for example, is virtually restricted to assumptions of the function of animal
pelts deposited in graves and later penitential literature, which itself appears to have been
following earlier, Mediterranean templates. The unusual character of Scandinavian society,
discussed at length in the seminar, is perhaps relevant to understanding the prevalence of
data (archaeological, artistic and written) on shape-changing and the physical blurring of
human/animal boundaries spanning a millennium, compared to other regions. Yet even
the regional variation in well-documented werewolf prosecutions in early modern central
Europe has yet to be satisfactorily explained.
The protracted nature of religious conversion may be an important factor, but this
should make the eastern Baltic the ideal laboratory for testing such ideas (Carver 2003).
Unfortunately, written sources are generally lacking until the appearance of expansive towns
in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Archaeological data is more fruitful but has yet
to be properly synthesised, and there is to date little additional evidence (e.g. iconographie)
for Livonian werewolves until sixteenth-century sources refer to them. The chronicles
of the Teutonic Order (from the early fourteenth century) do not appear to mention
875

"' '

Witcbcrafi and Deep Time - a debate at Harvard

shape-changing, although they do refer to other pagan beliefs and practices amongst the
Baits, including ones interpreted as 'shamanic'. This is certainly an area that will yield
potentially important and exciting new information on the nature of religious conversion in
European society; it is being pursued through projects such as 'The Ecology of Crusading'.

Archaeology, spirituality and social control


Martin Carver
Spirituality is part of the make-up of the evolving hominin - and spirituality itself may
prove to be evolutionary. You can infer spiritual behaviour in 'ancient' humans such as
Neanderthals (Mithen 1996), and we are entitled to suppose that spirituality becomes more
complex as the brain becomes more dexterous. But if spirituality is reflected in Palaeolithic
objects and cave painting (Lewis-Williams 2002), there must have been a major change in
relations with the spirit world at the end of the ice age, at least in countries that had one
(Mithen 2003). At that point 12 000 years ago, the landscape was reinvented, the zonation
of the natural and the supernatural worlds should have settled, and it is logical to expect
religious belief to be henceforward embedded in regionality.
For archaeologists the most accessible narrative of Holocene spirituality is provided by
material evidence for the mental control of increasingly large numbers of people (Trigger
2002). For example, by 5000 BC the graves of Yellow River China contain flutes and
tortoise-shell rattles, which signal the first appearance of the spiritual specialist through
whose good offices rulers rule. By the Shang period from 4000 years ago there is little
doubt that individual spirituality is largely under central control. Human sacrifice is an early
expression of this belief system and it takes place on a prodigious scale. K.C. Chang (2005)
makes the case for the ideology being the product of blending the shaman with the war
leader, a winning formula in every sense. What archaeology actually observes is not morality,
hell or the gods, but human dominance through different kinds of fear. Theocratic social
control is suspected in Mesopotamia from 5000 BC, Egypt from 3500 BC, in India from
1500 BC, in the so-called European Beaker movement of 2000 BC, in European Christianity
from AD 400 and so on. The material characteristic of such politicised belief systems (or
religions) is conformity and similarity of expression over vast areas. These universalising
religions, which insist on conformity of spiritual behaviour and even belief, naturally tend
to inhibit or suppress allegiance to local spirits. But one can suppose that earlier allegiance
persists as a kind of dark matter on which people can draw when they need or when they
can. It seeps into the religious body, or if oppressed erupts as a rebellion, heresy or deviance
and is speedily defined as such by authority, and in this way comes to notice.
However there is no guarantee that medieval heretics or early Modern deviants will know
or remember prehistoric ritual or its meaning with any accuracy. Thus if alternative and
dissident belief systems crop up from time to time among the norms, as is supposed with
witchcraft, they are likely to be (a) regional, articulating loyalties to landscape, and (b)
fantastical, because of not knowing or misremembering previous practice. Just as Ronald
Hutton has demonstrated that modern paganism is a modern construction (2009), so
it seems to me that the paganism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is also a
contemporary construction, possibly one even less well informed about the local prehistory.
876

Stephen Mitchell et al.

Witchcraft may open a window into the soul, revealing an anguished demand for alternative
ritual, but not a consciously conserved version of ancient practice. People do not go to the
stake to defend their version of prehistory. They express their retaliations of mind in terms of
the contemporary materials to hand, which may include garbled memories of the past. This
suggests a less specific system of reference to deep time than that supposed by James Frazer
(1922) and Robert Graves (1961), and perhaps even that of Carlo Ginzberg's thesis (1991).
For me, the structure of pre-literate knowledge is largely decomposed, like archaeological
strata; but like strata, the causes of its variation may still lie partly in the prior geography of
distant prehistories (Carver 2009).
Does this mean that there is to be no meeting between pre-Christian thinking and the
documentation of the witch trials? One priority, clearly, is to know and understand the
local prehistory better, so there are stronger comparisons to bring to the table. It is by no
means excluded that the components of the idea-fossils we find will come into better focus
by virtue of us all working together with objects, sites, stories and records. One day we may
discover a place, or a set of objects, in which history, ethnology, legend, and inquisition
coincide with a good quality archaeological sequence; then we may see rather more clearly
the connections between past and present that we feel should be there.

Archaeology, history and inference


Carlo Ginzburg
Let us assume that the respective cognitive practices of archaeologists and historians
overlap to some extent. They both deal with heterogeneous evidence, written and unwritten.
The evidence archaeologists deal with consists mostly of things (tools, bone fragments,
pieces of stone and so forth); the evidence historians deal with consists mostly of written
documents of various kind (including transcripts based on interviews). Obviously, the
interaction between written and unwritten evidence plays a crucial role in both disciplines
- more evidently so, perhaps, in archaeology. But if one accepts this rough description,
a question may arise: do the different classes of evidence, written and unwritten, imply
different constraints and possibilities? And if this is the case, which ones? My answer will
start from a lecture delivered in 1903 by Charles Sanders Peirce: neither a historian nor an
archaeologist, but a philosopher.
Reacting against Auguste Comte, the French positivist, who 'would condemn every theory
that was not "verifiable"', Peirce put forward an example taken from archaeology:
'when Schliemann entertained the hypothesis that there really had been a city of Troy
and a Trojan War, this meant to his mind among other things that when he should
come to make excavations at Hissarlik he would probably find remains of a city with
evidences of a civilization more or less answering to the descriptions of the Iliad, and
which would correspond with other probable finds at Mycenae, Ithaca, and elsewhere.
So understood, Comte's maxim is sound. Nothing but that is an explanatory hypothesis.
But Comte's own notion of a verifiable hypothesis was that it must not suppose anything
that you are not able directly to observe. From such a rule it would be fair to infer that
he would permit Mr. Schliemann to suppose he was going to find arms and utensils at
877

Witchcrafi and Deep Time - a debate at Harvard


Hissarlik, but would forbid him to suppose that they were either made or used by any
human being, since no such beings could ever be detected by direct percept. He ought on
the same principle to forbid us to suppose that a fossil skeleton had ever belonged to a
living ichtyosaurus (...). The same doctrine wouldforbid us to believe in our memory
of what happened at dinnertime today' {Vtlcc 1974: v, 597).
Inferences made from visible evidence the cognitive gesture which Peirce labelled
'abduction' - are part of everyday practice of all human beings, including archaeologists and
historians. In Peirce's example, a written text (the Iliad) provided Schliemann with a narrative
involving names and actions (verbs), allowing him to make an inference from a name (Troy)
to another name (Hissarlik). Excavations made at Hissarlik allowed Schliemann to make
inferences from things (arms, utensils) to actions (or verbs) and actors, i. e. the human beings
who made or used them. Inferences made from either names or things are both legitimate:
but only an interaction with a written context would allow one to establish a link between
a thing and a name. This means that prosopography from below, potentially allowed to
historians dealing with written evidence, is usually forbidden to archaeologists (Ginzburg
& Poni 1991: 2-10). On the other hand, excavations provide archaeologists with a massive
amount of involuntary traces: the evidence which historians, following Marc Bloch, now
regard as a most revealing access to past societies (Bloch 2006: 892-3). Gonstraints and
possibilities: a fruitful dialogue between historians and archaeologists may start from here.
References

GINZBURG, C . & C. PONI. 1991. The name and

the

game, in E. Muir & G. Ruggiero (ed.) Microhistory


and the lost people of Europe. Baltimore (MD): Johns
Hopkins University Press.

BLOCH, M . 2006. Apologie pour l'histoire ou mtier


d'historien, in A. Becker & E. Bloch (ed.) L'histoire,
la guerre, la rsistance. Paris: Gallimard.
CARVER, M. 2000. Burial as poetry: the context of
treasure in Anglo-Saxon graves, in E. Tyler (ed.)
Treasure in the medieval West: 2548. Woodbridge:
York Medieval Press.

GOMBRICH, E.H. 1979. The sense of order: a study in the


psychology of decorative art. Oxford: Phaidon.
GRAVES, R. 1961. The White Goddess. London: Faber &
Faber.

GRIMALDI, P (ed.) 2003. Bestie, santi, divinit: maschere


animali dell'Europa tradizionak. Torino: Museo
Nazionale delta Montagna.
GUDMUNDSDTTIR, A. 2007. The werewolf in
medieval Icelandic Wiermute. Journal of English and
German Philology (July): 277-303.
2009. Early Scottish monasteries and prehistory: a
preliminary dialogue. The Scottish Historical Review
GUNNELL, T. 1995. The origins of drama in Scandinavia.
88.2:332-51.
Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer.
CARVER, M . (ed.) 2003. The Cross goes north: processes of GUNNELL, T. (ed.) 2007. Masks and mumming in the
conversion in northern Europe AD 300-1300.
Nordic area. Uppsala: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs
Woodbridge: Boydell.
Akademien.
CHANG, K.C. 2005. The rise of kings and the
HurrON, R. 2009. Blood and mistletoe: the history of the
formation of city-states, in S. Allen (ed.) The
Druids in Britain. New Haven (CT): Yale
formation of Chinese civilisation: an archaeological
University Press.
perspective. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press
LEWIS-WILLIAMS,
D . 2002. The mind in the cave.
& Beijing: New World Press.
London: Thames c Hudson.
FRAZUR, J. 1922. The Golden Bough: a study in magic
LOREY, E. 2006. Werwolfprozesse in der frhen Neuzeit.
and religion. London: Macmillan.
Available at: http://www.elmar-lorey.de/
GINZBURG, C . 1991. Ecstasies: deciphering the witches'
Prozesse.htm (accessed 22 June 2010).
Sabbath. London: Hutchinson Radius.
MACKAY, C.S. (ed. & trans.) 2006. Malleus maleficarum.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

- 2001. Why that, why there, why then? The politics of


early medieval monumentality, in A Macgregor &
H. Hamerow (ed.) Image and power in early
medieval British archaeology: essays in honour of
Rosemary Cramp: \-ll. Oxford: Oxbow.

878

Stepben Mitcbell et al.


MITHEN, S. 1996. Theprehistory of the mind: a search for
the origins of art, science and religion. London:
Thames & Hudson.

PRICE, N . 2002. The Viking way: religion and war in late


Iron Age Scandinavia. Uppsala: Department of
Archaeology 6i Ancient History.

- 2003. After the ice: a global human history 20.000


-5000 BC. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson.

RAUDVERE, C . 2002. Trolldmr in early medieval


Scandinavia, in B. Ankarloo & S. Clark (ed.)
Witchcraft and magic in Furope (The Athlone history
of witchcraft vol 3, The Middle Ages): 73-172.
London: Athlone Press.

MOREIAND, J. 200]. Archaeology and text. London:


Duckworth.
MURRAY, M.A. 1921. The witch-cult in western Furope.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
PASTOUREAU, M. 2000. Pourquoi tant de lions dans
l'Occident mdival? Micrologus: Natura, scienze e
societ medievali 8/1: 11-30.
PEIRCE.C.S. 1974 (1934). Collected papers of Charles
Sanders Peirce. Volume 5: Pragmatism and
pragmaticism, edited by Ch. Hartshorne & P. Weiss.
Cambridge (MA): Belknap Press/Harvard
University Press.

REDFIELD, R. 1955. The social organization of


tradition. The Far Fastern Quarterly 15(1):

3-21.

SEMPLE, S.J. 1998. A fear of the past: the place of the


prehistoric burial mound in the ideology of middle
and later Anglo-Saxon England. World Archaeology
30(1): 109-26.
TRIGGER, B.G. 2002. Understanding early civilizations: a
comparative study. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
TwYGROSS, M. & S. CARPENTER. 2002. Masks and
masking in medieval and early Tudor Fngland.
Aldershot: Ashgate.

PLUSKOWSKI, A . G . 2005. The tyranny of the


gingerbread house: contextualising the fear of
wolves in medieval northern Europe through
material culture, ecology and folklore. Current
Swedish Archaeology 13: 14160.

ri

879

Copyright of Antiquity is the property of Antiquity and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple
sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen